Quote from: Christopher Brady;964572They don't help anything, other than to make people game the system.  You don't teach people a game by punishing them for wrongthink, you explain to them what you want out of the game.  And if you can't them get to play nice, you don't play with them.

Karma was a genre enforcement rule that seemed meant to make the player figuratively share their character's pain when they acted unheroically by the standards of a late Silver/early Bronze comic setting. Its entirely understandable that if you don't like that style or genre enforcement rules entirely that you wouldn't like them. That mood wasn't even a ubiquitous standards in the MU itself at the time and I recall a handful of published adventure for FASERIP offered variations on the baseline Karma rules to reflect different subgenres (like Cosmic Supers and Magical Supers). I found them to be occasionally annoying but generally effective in guiding player behabior though not without some grumbling like most "stick" style mechanics will cause

I do think it was a poor design choice tying your 'Bennies' and  your 'experience points' together into one expendable resource especially since advancement was so slow overall. Though that may have been an attempt to model the slow figurative advancement of  comic book characters relative to the amount of narrative action they see and how long they've been active.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;965309This is exactly what CoD was supposed to do once upon a time.

I can't speak for Anon, but I like mechanics that don't punish you for playing an inhuman monster in a game about inhuman monsters. There are much better ways to measure the descent into monsterdom, like replacing human traits with vampiric ones.

1. It still is. Kinda. It doesn't have any metaplot. It's focus is local. There isn't any setting canon. Still I think there is something missing, but I am never able to put my finger on it exactly. I think nwod/cod still has the classic WW problem of too much fluff and (therefor) too much rules being spread out over a number of books.
There is also a lack of focus in what the player characters are going to do and how the npc's are going to react to that, because the focus is more on certain themes and how to incorporate those in your story. I mean the blue books (second sight, reliquery, mysterious places, urban legends) are theoretically awesome and there is nothing like it in other rpg's, but I always have a hard time figuring out what to do with it and how to use it in my games. Mostly because of the way the books are written.

2. In Requiem 2nd edition you have Banes you can take instead of taking a humanity drop.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;9653272. In Requiem 2nd edition you have Banes you can take instead of taking a humanity drop.

Like Paths and Touchstones, Banes are a crutch for an inherently bad mechanic. I would suggest instead replacing mundane skills, merits, whatever with vampire disciplines, merits, whatever. It may be difficult to visualize, since ST is a poorly designed simulationist system rather than a freeform or narrative or whatever it's called system. Not that I would do that, since I dropped the ST system a long time ago for precisely that reason.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;965089It's making me surprisingly happy too.

Seeing the pretentious twats who ruined the original World Of Darkness cut out of the picture by new White Wolf gives me quite a bit of personal satisfaction.

The original World Of Darkness would have worked fine. If not for the metaplot pushing idiots that believed their stories should take precedence over that of the primary audience the  games were aimed at. Over that of the individual game groups.

In their hubris, they utterly missed the point of what a roleplaying game is supposed to be about. Which was: To give the individual game groups the power to tell their own stories. And letting their PCs be the stars of their show.

This guy gets it.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;965594This guy gets it.

I submit that any reasonable GM that used Vampire, like any RPG, should be doing this *no matter what* anyhow.


"The game does not play your PC's. The players play the game."
"The story is what emerges when your PC's do things in your game."

Tractate II and IV of the Libram Primus Circularum Fraternum Pseudophallicus (aka 'Book of the First Circle of the Brotherhood of the D.O.N.G.')

I've listened to Ken talk about 5th edition plans on 2 different podcasts. Basically, good news for me and the RPG community in general but will definitely make a segment of the population that equates the Lore with the game itself very unhappy. That is, games have a setting (e.g., you're a vampire in a weird political community, other kinds of supernaturals exist, its a dark version of the modern day) and Lore (Hardestat the Younger an Important NPC did so and so on a certain day, clan gangrel just broke from the Camarilla).

Here's what I got out of what he said:

- there will be mechanics for stuff that's important about the setting / them. He mentioned Hunger / Feeding and Politics;
- the story will be about your characters; setting wise, Vampires now have more and more effective enemies - you'll be in your city most of the time telling your story;
- Lore will be toned down, with a lot of things becoming unreliable narrator, much less of a hill to climb for new players or GM's to work around. There won't be a lot of external decisions by important NPC's changing your story from the outside.
- It will be a bit like the Storyteller system, but not the storyteller system.

Like I said, great stuff for me and new players, people that identify strongly with the Lore will be very unhappy.

These sorts of "Living Campaign" gimmicks rarely work out for long. If at all. Eventually something changes in a way that somehow turns off a chunk of the fanbase and they stop or at least pull back their support as much. Or it just putters out when someone realizes its a gimmick that requires alot of work that is fraught with pitfalls and they could have just left things as was or not updated the setting so heavily.

Depends alot on just how much really changes with each update. If done in small increments then might well maintaine a good while.

Quote from: Darrin Kelley;964574Next generation Vampire. That's not a bad idea.

I'm liking what I am hearing about it. Most specifically on: The Hunger mechanic. It sounds like a huge improvement to the whole experience.

They seem to be taking several things from the NWoD which is fine with me and pissing off the old fan base which is even better in my opinion. Combined with some new concepts and setting conceits. I'm loving the nerdrage over Beckett's Journal at TBP it's so classic it hurts. For the first time I have a bit of hope that they might do Changeling the Dreaming and Mage the Ascension correctly.

Quote from: Marleycat;965730They seem to be taking several things from the NWoD which is fine with me and pissing off the old fan base which is even better in my opinion. Combined with some new concepts and setting conceits. I'm loving the nerdrage over Beckett's Journal at TBP it's so classic it hurts. For the first time I have a bit of hope that they might do Changeling the Dreaming and Mage the Ascension correctly.

I don't really understand why anyone takes published settings seriously to the point of flame wars. I always found it more fun to mix/match and cherrypick.

Monsterhearts and Urban Shadows do the metaphors and and politics better than WoD does, so there's little reason to use WoD over them when WoD's only draw is its convoluted setting. I recall someone made a WoD conversion to Urban Shadows but the links are all dead.

WoD dominates the market despite its competitors usually being better designed. Most of the competitors are either no longer supported or minimally supported. Why is this?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;965755WoD dominates the market despite its competitors usually being better designed. Most of the competitors are either no longer supported or minimally supported. Why is this?

Just my own supposition, but I'd say brand loyalty/name recognition/knowing that the gamer next door also knows the game and is willing to play it.

Urban Shadows just put out a new supplement or do you mean other 'competitors'? Magpie Games also put out a PbtA vampire game called Undying which I want to check out.

Quote from: Marleycat;965730Combined with some new concepts and setting conceits. I'm loving the nerdrage over Beckett's Journal at TBP it's so classic it hurts.

There has been a lot of overwrought gnashing of teeth, but I think that is a legitimate complaint. Deciding you are going to give people something other than what they thought they were pledging for is clumsy.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;965757Just my own supposition, but I'd say brand loyalty/name recognition/knowing that the gamer next door also knows the game and is willing to play it.

Name recognition counts for a lot. It's why Americans believe that crap sold in Coca-Cola cans in the United States actually tastes like Coca-Cola.

Quote from: Baulderstone;965760Name recognition counts for a lot. It's why Americans believe that crap sold in Coca-Cola cans in the United States actually tastes like Coca-Cola.

Not sure what to do with that specific example. Do you guys get cane-sugar coke where you are instead of high-fructose corn syrup or something?

As to name recognition, I think it's even a different beast between RPGs and cola preferences, because with RPGs, you need a group of like-minded individuals to sit down and play the game with you. That makes the primary/most popular/whatever brand all that more enticing.

Quote from: Voros;965759Urban Shadows just put out a new supplement or do you mean other 'competitors'? Magpie Games also put out a PbtA vampire game called Undying which I want to check out.

PbtA games and Dresden Files are the only ones that spring to my mind as still supported, and they aren't anywhere near as big as WoD. I list many more from the 90s and 00s which are no longer supported. I do like the community for PbtA much more than the community for WoD: they have a lot of creative output and don't argue about bizarre minutiae. It reminds me of WoD's heyday in the 90s that was once preserved on Zanzibar's website.

For sure. Gotta wonder how small the PbtA games must be when the biggest OSR titles sell maybe 2,000 copies tops. The whole industry is tiny really.